The Mail

Letters from our readers.

THE LIVES OF PAUL DE MAN

It is clear from Louis Menand’s review of Evelyn Barish’s biography that Paul de Man played American academic circles after the Second World War in exactly the same way that he played publishing circles under the Nazis (“The de Man Case,” March 24th). He attached himself to a powerful ideological élite, strengthening its cultural hegemony by his own skillful application of its signature jargon, stigmatizing those outside the cult by insisting on an exaggerated purity of approach, and thus securing the allegiance of the other members of the privileged coterie and distracting attention from his own corruption.

Janet H. Murray

Atlanta, Ga.

In 1983-84, I was a first-year Ph.D. student in Yale’s Comparative Literature Department, lured there in part by the brilliance of de Man’s “Blindness and Insight.” On the first day, we had to translate passages from French or German into English. At the get-together that followed, I met de Man for the first time, and remarked that the passages we had translated all seemed to have the quality of self-undoing about which he theorized. I remember the puddle of sherry jiggling in his glass as he cackled, “Yes! They fall apart! They just fall apart!” I suddenly saw nihilism where before I had seen brilliance, and I left Yale at the end of the year. Later, I became a clinical psychologist. Reading Menand’s review, I find it all too likely that the diagnosis of sociopathy is correct, and I agree that this neither invalidates de Man’s writing nor exculpates his actions.

Michael Lipson

Great Barrington, Mass.

Menand’s summation of the sad and disturbing life of Paul de Man and the legacy of his literary criticism was superb. At last, a perspective on de Man that does not whitewash his anti-Semitism and collaborationist history or vilify his literary criticism as the poisonous outcome of his earlier sins. I was one of de Man’s graduate students at Cornell in the early nineteen-sixties. He was a gifted, even inspired teacher, and he opened my eyes to the depth and rigor that true reading demands. How devastating it was to discover, years later, his profound immorality. Menand has captured those two realities—the intellectual brilliance and the moral stupidity—perfectly.

Jocelyn Harvey

Ottawa, Ont.

MOVING MOUNTAINS

Evan Osnos, in his article about the recent chemical spill in West Virginia, cites the Battle of Blair Mountain, in 1921, which set more than ten thousand coal miners against mine operators backed by police and federal troops, to illustrate that “the struggle over the costs and spoils of industrial production is as much a part of West Virginians’ self-image as the coal miner on the state flag” (“Chemical Valley,” April 7th). In fact, Blair Mountain continues to embody this tension. In March, 2009, the site of the battle was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but, following objections raised by the coal industry, it was removed from the register just nine months later. Today, permits for highly destructive mountaintop-removal mines now cover parts of the battlefield site. A monument to the state’s historic struggle over worker exploitation will therefore be replaced by an unintended monument to the state’s current struggle with environmental exploitation.

Peter Morgan

Denver, Colo.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.